Wendy
Doniger didn’t see the egg fly past her head,
but she heard it splatter against the wall behind her. Continuing
a November 2003 University of London lecture on the Hindu Ramayana
text, Doniger looked down, thinking perhaps she’d broken her
water glass against the podium. When an audience member shouted,
“It’s an egg!” she turned and saw the trickle
of raw goop. The man who’d thrown the ovoid missile quickly
exited the room.

During a post-talk discussion, an Indian woman
took the microphone and quietly read a series of questions that
went, as Doniger recalls: “From what psychoanalytic institution
do you have your degree?”

“None,” she replied.

“Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think you have the right
to psychoanalyze Hindu texts?”

They were questions that Doniger, the Mircea
Eliade distinguished service professor of the history of religions,
had heard before. At the November 2000 American Academy of Religion
(AAR) annual meeting in Nashville, her former students marked her
60th birthday by producing a Festschrift, Notes From a Mandala,
filled with essays assessing the state of Indology. A panel discussed
the impact that her teaching (at Chicago since 1978) and scholarship
(more than 20 books written, edited, and translated) has had on
religious studies. During the after-panel Q & A a man raised
his hand. Doniger called on him, and he asked her the same questions
the softspoken woman repeated three years later in London.

The man was Rajiv Malhotra, an entrepreneur and
activist living in New Jersey. Malhotra, who studied physics at
India’s St. Stephens College and computer science at Syracuse
University, now works full time at the Infinity Foundation, a nonprofit
he founded in 1995 to “upgrade the quality of understanding
of Indian civilization in the American media and educational system,
as well as among the English language educated Indian elite.”

Malhotra remembers the Nashville exchange differently
than Doniger does. As he recounts in a 2002 online essay, “Wendy’s
Child Syndrome”: “I...stood up and asked: Since you
have psychoanalyzed Hinduism and created a whole new genre of scholarship,
do you think it would be a good idea for someone to psychoanalyze
you, because an insight into your subconscious would make your work
more interesting and understandable?

“[S]he replied that there was nothing new
that any psychoanalyst would find about her, because she has not
hidden anything. I...stated that most clients also tell their psychoanalysts
that they have nothing hidden in their mental basement, but that
such clients are precisely the most interesting persons to psychoanalyze.
She...took it well, and said, ‘You got me on this one.’
I...predict[ed] that research on her own private psychology would
get done in the next several years, and that it would become important
some day to psychoanalyze many other Western scholars also, since
they superimpose their personal and cultural conditioning on their
research about other peoples.”

His 23,591-word (including 91 footnotes) essay,
published on the Indian–community Web site Sulekha.com,
has become a pivotal treatise in a recent rift between some Western
Hinduism scholars—many of whom teach or have studied at Chicago—and
some conservative Hindus in India, the United States, and elsewhere.
Since G. M. Carstairs’s 1958 book The Twice-Born
(Hogarth Press) scholars have noted Freudian themes in old Indian
texts and stories, arguing, for example, that the god Ganesha can
be read as having an Oedipus complex. More recently, with the Internet’s
help, the Hindu diaspora—about 2 million in the United States,
according to the Hindu American Foundation—has become better
organized. Some members have begun to protest that Western scholars
distort their religion and perpetuate negative stereotypes. They’ve
raised questions about who should teach and interpret their texts,
whether it’s appropriate to apply psychoanalysis and other
Western constructs to South Asian culture, whether there is one
correct way to teach religion, and how Hindus are portrayed in the
West.

In two years Malhotra’s essay received
more than 22,000 hits and generated 445 comments (several by Malhotra
himself) and two response essays. Most readers agreed with his conclusion:
“Rights of individual scholars must be balanced against rights
of cultures and communities they portray, especially minorities
that often face intimidation. Scholars should criticize
but not define another’s religion.” Other readers
took their anger farther, calling for the scholars’ resignations,
sending hate mail, tossing eggs, or issuing death threats. The adamant,
at times violent responses parallel a political movement in India,
where conservative Hindu nationalists have gained power since the
early 1990s. Though Malhotra’s academic targets say he has
some valid discussion points, they also argue that his rhetoric
taps into the rightward trend and attempts to silence unorthodox,
especially Western, views.

For instance, in “Wendy’s Child Syndrome”
Malhotra condemns “the eroticisation of Hinduism by Wendy
Doniger, who is un-doubtedly the most powerful person in academic
Hinduism Studies today,” and “her large cult of students,
who glorify her in exchange for her mentorship.” He notes
that religious studies—a field that teaches about a religion
without preaching its beliefs—is rare in India, making academic
discussions of Hinduism a mostly Western conversation. “Under
Western control,” he argues, “Hinduism studies has produced
ridiculous caricatures that could easily be turned into a Bollywood
movie or a TV serial.”

He cites, among others, two books for which Doniger
wrote the forewords: Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings
(Oxford University Press, 1985), by Emory University interim religion
department chair Paul B. Courtright, and Kali’s Child:
The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna
(University of Chicago Press, 1995), by Rice University religious
studies chair Jeffrey J. Kripal, PhD’93.

Malhotra also quotes Harvard South Asian studies
chair Michael E. J. Witzel, who has questioned Doniger’s Sanskrit
translations and her proclivity for finding sexual meanings in ancient
texts. Doniger, who was named Martin Marty Center director this
year and whose appointments span the Divinity School, the Department
of South Asian Languages & Civilizations, the Committees on
the Ancient Mediterranean World and Social Thought, and the College,
knows that her work, including a retranslation of the Kamasutra
(Oxford, 2002), can be controversial. “If people think sexuality
is a shameful thing, then it’s embarrassing for them to have
the texts that talk about it discussed,” she says. “A
Sanskrit word can have ten different meanings. A translator must
choose, based on her knowledge of the context. Choosing the sexual
meaning,” she continues, “is not incorrect if that is
one of the attested meanings. It’s a matter of, Did the author
mean that? You can make a judgment, and another person can argue
and say you chose the wrong meaning.”

After Malhotra’s essay hit the Web Doniger
received a dozen negative e-mails. One person asked, “Were
you raped as a child? Is that why you write such things?”
At first, she says, she responded. When a critic argued, “Everything
you’ve written about Hinduism is incorrect. You must have
bought your degree from Harvard,” she asked to which books
the protester was referring. “I would never read anything
you’ve written,” came the reply. At that point, she
thought, “That’s it. This is not a serious discussion,”
and she stopped answering such messages and reading the online debates.
After last year’s egg incident she canceled a lecture in Bombay.

Emory’s Courtright, meanwhile, faced harsher
threats. His book, Ganesa, received little attention outside
academia when it was first published in 1985. In it he uses several
methods to interpret the story of Ganesha, the god created by his
mother, the goddess Parvati, to guard the door while she bathed.
When her husband, Shiva, came home to a stranger blocking the way
to his wife, he beheaded Ganesha. Pavarti protested, so Shiva brought
him back to life and replaced his head with that of an elephant.
On page 103 of his book Courtright includes a psychoanalytic interpretation—“It
would have been odd if I hadn’t done so,” he
said in a Divinity School lecture this past April—noting the
story’s oedipal theme of father-son confrontation and its
alternative conclusion of the son being wounded rather than the
father. He compares Ganesha, who is celibate in most versions, to
a eunuch who stands at a harem doorway. And previous scholars, Courtright
writes, have called Ganesha’s broken tusk and his trunk phallic
symbols.

“I was approaching this story,” he
said, “as belonging to the public domain, not just Hindus.”
Some Hindus, however, didn’t see it that way. After Ganesa’s
second edition in 2001 and Malhotra’s essay in 2002, the University
of Louisiana, Lafayette, Hindu Student Council collected 7,000 signatures
on an Internet petition asking for a public apology, a recall of
the book, and a new version changing parts the group found offensive.
In India, where the conservative, recently defeated Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) was still in power, the book was withdrawn from bookstores.
Courtright received hate mail, including some threats. “You
will get what you deserve from Lord Ganesha,” one read. “He
should be tortured alive until he turns to ash,” went another.

This past February eight members of a local Hindu
organization, the Concerned Community of Atlanta, met with Emory
College dean Robert Paul, AM’66, PhD’70, and other faculty.
The group wanted the school to “reiterate their feelings of
insult,” classify his interpretations “as acts of racial
insensitivity,” have Courtright issue an apology, remove him
from teaching Hinduism courses, and “find Hindu scholars to
teach Hinduism.” After the meeting Paul wrote a letter explaining
that Courtright’s book was not meant “to offend or provoke
but to explore hidden connections.” He noted that using psychoanalysis
was “widely controversial but widely accepted as scholarly
work of good faith.” The group wrote back to say they weren’t
satisfied, but the conflict has faded a bit since then.

“These things have a shelf life,”
Courtright says in a November interview. “It’s moved
on.” Still, Malhotra and his cohorts are “building a
general case that American scholars of Hinduism are anti-Hindu,”
he contends. Recently on Malhotra’s radar screen, Courtright
notes, is David White, AM’81, PhD’88, University of
California–Santa Barbara religious studies chair. White’s
book Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in its South Asian Contexts
(Chicago, 2003), Malhotra argues in a May Svabhinava.org
entry, contends that the Hindu tantra tradition “was intended
as South Asian decadent sexuality, without spiritual purpose, and
that this decadence was the result of sociological suffering of
Indian subaltern (lower castes) in classical times.” On the
same Web site White’s former student Jeffrey S. Lidke counters
that the writer “does not reduce the origins of tantra to
anything other than the sphere of religion” and that rather
than “decadent,” tantric sex in White’s account
“was a primary means by which yogins and yoginis ultimately
became immortal.”

Malhotra also argues that U.S. Hinduism scholars
actively promote each other’s work. “You scratch my
back, and I’ll scratch yours—this seems to be the modus
operandi of this cult of scholars,” he writes. To Courtright,
though, the academic study of Hinduism “works like anything
else”: an author submits a book to a publisher, the publisher
sends the text to expert scholars for review, and “on the
basis of those opinions they’ll make a decision on whether
to publish it.” The idea, he says, “that we all somehow
get in a room and figure out who we’re going to publish and
who we’re going to screw over is ridiculous.”

While Courtright has answered critics in lectures
and essays, Rice’s Kripal has gone further, writing a new
introduction to Kali’s Child, fixing translation
errors, publishing several essays including a Sulekha.com response
to “Wendy’s Child Syndrome,” and setting up a
Web site (www.ruf.rice.edu/~kalischi/)
explaining his side of the story. In Kali’s Child,
which won the AAR’s 1996 award for best first book in the
history of religions, he analyzes an original Bengali text to glean
new information about the 19th-century saint Ramakrishna, an important
figure in modern Hinduism known for experiencing ecstatic states
and visions and for inspiring the Ramakrishna Order. The title refers
to the goddess Kali, whom Ramakrishna saw in his visions. Kripal
translates one passage as saying that during his mystical experiences
Ramakrishna often placed his foot “‘in the lap’
(kole)—that is, on the genitals—of a young
boy disciple.” Interpreting that line and others through the
lenses of both psychoanalysis and Hindu tantra, Kripal argues that
the saint’s ecstasies were driven by “mystico-erotic
energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood.” In
fact, Kripal writes, the experiences were “profoundly, provocatively,
scandalously erotic,” and Ramakrishna harbored unconscious
“homoerotic” desires for “young, beautiful boys.”

Malhotra slams Kripal’s “scandalous
conclusions,” his command of Bengali, and his psychological
motivations. But he wasn’t the first to criticize the book.
In January 1997 Calcutta’s English-language daily the Statesman
published a full-page negative review, generating a flurry of even
angrier letters to the editor and further media attention. “It
morphed into a ban movement. The central government got involved,”
and, he says, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation started
a file on him.

Two Ramakrishna Order reviewers pointed out translation
errors—Swami Atmajnanananda (born Stuart Elkman) in the International
Journal of Hindu Studies and Swami Tyagananda in a self-published
and online article. Kripal printed apologies and fixed the errors
flagged in time for the 1998 second edition. Mistakes found after
the new edition, he says, “are all minor and can be changed
easily without changing the thesis.” Several items criticized
as errors, he argues, “are issues of interpretation, not translation
per se.”

In spring 2001 another ban movement germinated
in India, this time escalating beyond the papers and into the upper
house of Parliament, where it failed—not because Kali’s
Child wasn’t offensive, according to newspaper accounts,
but because “it would have given undue publicity” to
the book. Then a letter-writing campaign tried to block his 2002
tenure at Rice. And though many readers liked the book—“I
have received hundreds of appreciative letters, some from spiritual
leaders, scholarly reviews that are extremely enthusiastic, and
numerous enthusiastic responses from Hindu readers”—Kripal
has “pretty much spent the last eight years responding to
these critics.”

His response included another book, Roads
of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study
of Mysticism (Chicago, 2001), which is “one long argument
that most mystical traditions are homoerotic,” he says. There
he applies “the same methods of Kali’s Child to Christian,
Islamic, and Jewish mysticism, to the lives of Western scholars,
and to my own life and thought, including my own experience of being
psychoanalyzed.” In other words, he argues, it isn’t
only in Hinduism but in many religions that Western scholars see
hidden, often sexual, meanings.

ALTHOUGH ACADEMICS
FREQUENTLY INTERPRET religions through a sexual
lens (see, for example, Theodore W. Jennings Jr.’s The
Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament
[Pilgrim Press, 2003]), for some Hindus such scholarship has hit
a sensitive chord. Online writers complain that psychoanalysis has
been discredited in psychology, and applying it implies that Hindus
are “sick.” But “historians of religion are not
doing therapy; they’re interpreting texts,” Kripal argues.
“A model can be accurate and therapeutically unhelpful”
(though for him personally, he says, psychoanalysis has been an
effective therapy). “People use psychoanalysis or Foucault
because it’s the most sophisticated language we have in the
West to talk about the questions we have.” In Kali’s
Child, he says, he doesn’t apply a strict Freudian analysis
but also interprets Ramakrishna’s story through the Hindu
tantric tradition. “Both are languages,” he says, “that
turn to sexuality as the key to human religious experience.”

Even so, many Jewish or Christian studies scholars
were born into the religion they study, giving them, as Barnard
College religion professor John Stratton Hawley puts it, “some
sort of perceived right to speak. That’s not the case for
people like us [Doniger, Kripal, Courtright, himself] who have come
to Hinduism only later in life.”

Hawley, who also has scuffled with Malhotra,
acknowledges the need for more Hindus in the field. “As a
secular academic discipline, religious studies scarcely exists in
India,” he notes. “What theology meant in the British
academy was Christian studies.” Hence India’s educational
landscape is different than in the United States. Although students
of Indian descent often take up history, literature, anthropology,
or the sciences, “that hasn’t happened in religion.
It’s going to take a generation for people who are Hindu by
background to enter religious studies in large numbers.” Meanwhile,
Hawley says, “newly immigrant families have encouraged sons
and daughters to enter fields that seem more meaningful, more mainstream”—not
to mention more lucrative. So while few Hindus have gone into religious
studies, “the injustice isn’t caused by someone like
me, but by the long history of what has happened. We train Hindus
to enter the field alongside non-Hindus, and are very eager to do
so. It takes time for the numbers to even out on the other side
of the Ph.D.”

It’s a problem Malhotra also laments. In
“Wendy’s Child Syndrome” he notes that “a
peculiar brand of ‘secularism’ has prevented academic
religious studies from entering [India’s] education system
in a serious manner.” Therefore, unlike other religions, he
writes in an e-mail interview, “there is a lack of Indic perspective
that would...provide equivalent counter balance” to Western
scholars’ theories, creating an “asymmetric discourse.”
Further, he says, most of the Hinduism scholars are “either
whites or Indians under the control of whites. One does not find
Arabs, Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, etc., engaged in this kind of
Hinduphobia racket.” He’s begun to research “whiteness
studies,” which analyzes the “anthropology of white
culture and uncovers their myths. ... I am researching issues such
as white culture’s Biblical based homophobia, deeply ingrained
guilt of sex (Garden of Eden episode) and condemnation of the body.
... I posit that many white scholars are driven into Hinduism studies
by their own private voyeurism or fantasy, or an attempted escape
from white culture’s restrictions. This is what I earlier
called Wendy’s Child Syndrome because my sample was a few
of Doniger’s students. But now the sample is much larger...”

The Indian/white, or insider/outsider, issue
has been debated in both academia and the Hindu community. In September
2002 Sankrant Sanu, a former Microsoft manager and freelance writer,
argued in a Sulekha.com essay that Microsoft’s online Encarta
encyclopedia article on Hinduism—written by Doniger—put
forth “a distinctively negative portrayal of Hinduism,”
especially when compared to the entries on Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam. Sanu recommended that someone “emic” to the
community rewrite the Hinduism entry, as had been the case for the
other religions. Microsoft obliged, exchanging Doniger’s essay
with one by Arvind Sharma, a McGill University professor of comparative
religion.

For Sharma, author of Classical Hindu Thought:
An Introduction (Oxford, 2000), the debate has shades of gray.
“Both the insider and the outsider see the truth,” he
writes in an e-mail interview, “but genuine understanding
may be said to arise at the point of their intersection. At this
intersection one realizes that the Shivalinga [the icon of the god
Shiva] is considered a phallic symbol by outsiders but rarely by
Hindus themselves, or that the Eucharist looks like a cannibalistic
ritual to outsiders but not to Christians.” He continues,
“If insiders and outsiders remain insulated they develop illusions
of intellectual sovereignty. Each is required to call the other’s
bluff.”

There’s a fine line, some scholars say,
between legitimate Hindu concerns and the right-wing political wave
that has recently hit India. Although Malhotra, for example, condemns
the violence and threats, he has acknowledged in a Washington
Post article that the Hindu right has appropriated his arguments.
Just as he points to certain Western academics, arguing they perpetuate
what he calls the “caste, cows, curry, dowry” stereotypes,
in India, says Vijay Prashad, AM’90, PhD’94, a Trinity
College assistant professor of international studies, “the
Hindu right has taken education as an important field of political
battle,” trying, for instance, to install conservative textbooks
in schools.

Malhotra’s goal is to “rebrand India,”
says Prashad, a self-described Marxist who studied history and anthropology,
not religious studies, at Chicago, and who has debated Malhotra
in online forums. But “scholars, to me, are not in the business
of branding.” Malhotra and others “have created the
idea that there is one Indic thought,” Prashad says, but “there
are so many schools of thought within Hinduism.”

He does, however, agree with Malhotra about Western
educational institutions. “The U.S. academy is totally insular,”
he says. “We don’t engage the public often enough.”
Religious-studies professors, he argues, should write editorials
and otherwise engage the public as often as political scientists.
“The oxygen in public opinion is being sucked by people like
Rajiv [Malhotra]. He’s the only one pressing so hard. He uses
that silence to say that people are arrogant and they don’t
have any answers.”

For Doniger it’s a matter of considering
multiple explanations. Both Courtright and Kripal, she says, “applied
psychoanalysis in a limited way, and they found something that is
worth thinking about. They said this could be one of the things
that’s going on here, not the only thing.” She understands
that Indians are sensitive to postcolonial threats to their culture.
“For many years Europeans wrote anything they wanted and took
anything they wanted from India,” she says. “Even now
so much of Indian culture is influenced by American political and
economic domination. And India is quite right to object to that.”
The protesters, however, have transferred that concern to an intellectual
level, arguing “that Western scholars have pushed out Indian
views the same way Coca-Cola has pushed out Indian products.”
But, she argues, “it’s a false model to juxtapose intellectual
goods with economic ones. I don’t feel I diminish Indian texts
by writing about or interpreting them. My books have a right to
exist alongside other books.”

Though Doniger often (but not always) focuses
on sexuality, the current protests derive from more than a Victorian
sense of decorum, says Prashad. The issue seeps deeper, he says,
stemming from the Hindu right’s “protofascist views.”
Recent events demonstrate the lengths to which some nationalists
have taken their protests. This past January a group looted India’s
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute because it was where James
W. Laine, Macalester College’s humanities dean, had researched
his book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford,
2003)—which suggests that the revered parents of Shivaji,
a Hindu nationalist icon, may have been estranged. A month earlier
another group attacked Indian historian Shrikant Bahulkar, tarring
his face, because Laine had thanked him in his acknowledgements.

Though such violence hasn’t occurred in
the United States, Western scholars have felt the effects of India’s
new politics. In her Hyde Park home Doniger displays her Indian
art collection—colorful tapestries, bronze sculptures including
dozens of Ganeshas, and paintings adorn every surface. “A
lot of these things you couldn’t buy in India now,”
she says, noting that some pieces she bought in the 1960s have become
antiques, which today India, like many countries, protects from
exportation. But unlike art, ideas don’t get stopped at the
border.